Adam Scott might be eliminating the World Golf Championship events with new compact PGA Tour schedule

Adam Scott might be eliminating the World Golf Championship events with new compact PGA Tour schedule

HONOLULU -- The new PGA Tour schedule that kicked in this year was designed to flow better, with the four majors lined up in consecutive months, but it also is more compact, which leads to some hard choices for players making out their itineraries for the year.

It's not unheard of for a player to skip a World Golf Championship event. But Adam Scott currently is entertaining the notion that he might not play in any of the three remaining WGC events this season.

"In the end I just kind of took the simple approach and thought I'll just play the ones I like and that make sense to play," the former No. 1 player in the world said Wednesday at the Sony Open in Hawaii. "Any inconvenience, whether it's a big tournament or not -- I don't know how everyone can define a big tournament differently -- but at the moment I have not scheduled a World Golf Championship because they don't fall in the right weeks for me."

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Scott, the 2013 Masters champion, finished T-18 at the WGC-HSBC Champions in October before taking a long break in which he also didn't compete in his home country of Australia and didn't touch a club for six weeks, perhaps the longest layoff since he turned pro. The next WGC is the Mexico Championship in late February, the last event on the West Coast and coming right after the Genesis Open at Riviera Country Club, one of Scott's favorite venues. The WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play falls two weeks before the Masters. The season's finale in the series is the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational, which not only replaced the Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio -- where Scott won in 2011 -- but also is scheduled the week after the Open Championship in Northern Ireland.

And at age 38, Scott, not surprisingly, said his goal at this stage of his careers is to win majors. WGCs are nice and all, but they are not close to majors in the big picture. "I would like to think most of my achievements are still to come. You can't escape -- for me it's about winning major championships. That's the measure of a career really in this game."

As for the WGCs, Scott, ranked 41st in the world, might change his mind as the season progresses, but for now he seems set on there being no deviations from the plan.

"I feel like there are good tournaments right around them that are a preferred option," he said. "It is tricky. I thought that was interesting for my schedule change. I wouldn't have thought that was the case, but that is the case at the moment."